Black line drawing of a bird's head and claws woven into an interlaced Celtic knotwork pattern, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Knotwork bird line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a bird with a long, hooked beak and clawed feet, its body formed from looping, interlaced ribbon strands in a Celtic knotwork pattern. It is rendered in clean, even black outline on a white background, with no shading or fill. The composition is a single diagonal figure, with the beak at the top left and the claws at the lower left.

Bird Raven Knotwork Celtic knot Claw Beak

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bosun had a rule about ravens, which was that nobody named them, because a named bird would stay aboard for ever. Ours was called Quill anyway, by the cabin boy, who fed it biscuit soaked in tea and got his fingers pecked for his trouble. We were four weeks out of Bristol with a hold full of salt cod and a leak nobody had found, and the bird seemed to know where the water was coming in before the pumps did.

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Most nights it sat on the mainmast cross-tree, hunched against the wind, its claws hooked round the hemp as if it had tied itself there. I used to watch the lines it made in the rigging, the way the ropes crossed and recrossed into loops that never quite ended. Old Haskett said the sailmakers' knots were the same as the carvings on the stone crosses at home, endless ribbons that wander and come back to where they started, and that a bird wrapped in such knots was a bird that meant to find its way home.

On the thirty-first day the cabin boy went missing. We searched the bilges by lantern for an hour before Quill dropped down the forehatch and walked straight to a loose plank by the pump well. The boy was asleep behind it, wedged among the spare canvas, wet to the knees and grinning. The bird had its beak full of his shirt cord, and it would not let go until I prised the cord from it with my knife.

When we made harbour at St Mary's a fortnight later, the raven lifted off the cross-tree without a sound. It circled the masthead twice, loops over loops, then flew east towards the coast we had come from. I never learned whether it was ours or the sea's, but I still look up at the rigging of any ship I board, hoping to find those knotted lines.